


Nymphoid Nightmares

by ginger_infiltrator



Series: Metamorphose [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: First Person, Force Bond, Gen, Insanity, M/M, POV Anakin, POV First Person, crazy ranting anakin, dreamscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 21:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7331047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginger_infiltrator/pseuds/ginger_infiltrator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anakin reaches out to his grandson. Soon the boy will bend and stretch into an uncontrollable monster, or he will come into his own as something fierce and undeniable. </p><p>((So, this is in first person, which I feel is a kind of fandom original sin. Soon you will be able to skip to the next three parts, which are mercificully in third person. I just had too much fun in Anakin's head.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nymphoid Nightmares

I suppose I should start off with an apology. I certainly owe you one, if not many. I should apologize for not being there when you were soft and vulnerable. Then again, I should apologize for being too present. 

It was just too hard, once I had found the bright little spark of your mind so far away, to leave you alone. The obsession spiraled higher with the regret. I had not seen my own children stretch and grow in this way. From the blackness, I could sense their dreaming minds, maybe dip in a toe or two, before losing the thread and then fumbling backwards into this scarred lump of awkward flesh. The towline connecting us snapped early, a casualty of my madness. I found them again later, solidifying, almost fully formed. We would not have that trying time of push and pull, of growth and withering. They would never change me as I raised them. I would never try and fail to mold their headstrong little souls. No, we would meet each other as nearly equals if we met at all. 

And then, you.

I couldn’t possibly leave you alone. 

Hopefully one day you’ll forgive me. 

 

…

 

I saw you in a dream. Then again, dreams occupied all my semiconscious hours. It is hard to make heads or tails of delirium when the terrain is constantly churning. 

I remember the desert at night. I walked along the blank expanse, as alone as I had ever been. The darkening sky melted into the dark sand, lit feebly by the one purpling sun that refused to set but rested gravid on the horizon. An odd grain or two would catch the light and sparkle. Little jewels in the dark, a cruel thing to remind me of everything absent. 

When I was younger, although a bit older than the toddling child I found in you, I would stare across the sandy sea and dream of wandering. Just walking tirelessly forward until I had found something more. The “something more” did not matter. Only the exodus became important. Later, when I had found what little courage I could scrounge up, I would stroll the desert in the night. I always knew when my mother resurfaced from her sleep. She never woke to my absence. 

Afterwards I wandered, a fully grown but broken man, somewhere in the desert halfway between consciousness and the abyss. The grit under my feet scratched insistently at the charred skin there. Nothing in front of me but sand and sky and sand, sand, sand. The twin suns would have burned me further, had I found myself under their harsh light. I trudged through a twilight never ending. Even now I’m unsure whether this actually happened, or if it spun outward from my hallucinating mind. Maybe I laid still and seized in the dark. Maybe I wandered in the sand until the soles of my feet bled and my throat withered. It is no longer important to me.

But there in the darkness, that semi-pitch purple haze, I could see you, a dim glow slowly brightening somewhere out of my reach. Little creatures scattered across the silt around my feet but they could not match the overwhelming sense of life you bore. 

In the early years your form blurred and shifted, slowly settling into a plump and tottering child. Could you sense me then? Could you see me, creeping ever closer towards you? I was desperate for that chance, that one chance at parenthood that I had lost forever when I abandoned my own children. And there you were, a resplendent bud on my family tree. Another try. I named you then, not knowing or caring for the names they gave you. I named you Kylo, and Ren, the names I would have given my twin children. I am sorry, if only slightly, that those names clung to you harder than the one your mother chose. I whispered them every night, a tiny prayer that you might turn and hear me. That you might come to me. 

Sometimes I sang. Do you remember? I never really sang before, but then, for you, I could dredge up those old melodies my mother would hum quietly when she thought I was asleep. I didn’t worry that my voice was too coarse, refluxing up from a ravaged larynx. I only wondered if you could hear me. You did, didn’t you? Sometimes I swear I could see you smile and hum tonelessly along. 

Other times you would not accept me as fully. Other times you would mewl and scream, darting into the comfort of your mother’s arms. How it burned, the jealousy for my own flesh and blood, that she could touch and comfort you! I’m sure I roiled and bubbled over in the darkest corners of your vision. In many ways I couldn’t help it. You must understand by now what I mean. You are so like me. 

Some nights, years later, I could gather up the misted particles of my psyche and coalesce next to you. You never seemed afraid. Were you? Maybe I couldn’t tell. Maybe I didn’t want to know. But I do remember assembling myself next to your bed, solid enough to stroke the soft curls of your dark hair. Your mother and uncle shuffled on the other side of your bedroom door, waiting for you to shriek out in a night terror. 

I told you stories, whatever I could think of, mostly little parables my master told me, sometimes the adventures I had had with my first teacher. On one night or another, I could see your eyes focused under your half-closed lids. You must’ve been pretending to be asleep. I knew you could hear me then. That curiosity smothered your fear and always has. That’s why you’ve come to me now, isn’t it?

I told you stories of my secret wife, how the light in her eyes would dance with both cunning and kindness. The light of Naboo’s star would illuminate the honeyed undertones in her hair, twisted intricately and bedizened with fragrant blue flowers. I told you about the lush green forests and fields, so humbling and inconceivable to this dusty desert wretch. Really, there was no choice but to fall into love and obsession with that brilliant woman and her glistening emerald planet. I remember her heavy pregnant belly, two sparks of potential twinkling next to her own radiance in the psychic atmosphere. 

I did not tell you of the gnawing fear, that ever-present nagging in the company of happiness that assured me that all that I loved would be taken from me. You learned my mother’s name, but not how she spent her long, last moments tormented by fangs and stinging blisters in the dark desert night. I didn’t tell you what sick twisting pleasure I found rending her murderers’ bodies, inhaling the burnt scent of vindication. 

I did not tell you how intimately your own mind could betray you. Mine twisted back on me in fear and cannibalized all the tender morsels of weakness it could find. It left a stinging, enraged beast made of exposed nerves and insecurities, a wretched thing that lashed out at its own mate and kin, only to flee into the softest, darkest niche it could find. There the animal simmered and licked its stinging burns, dreaming of the brother that had betrayed and sliced it to pieces. 

No, those lessons I vowed to teach you later, when you had shed that wispy veil of childhood innocence. I did not expect that our connection would wither as you grew. Such a headstrong child! You outgrew the need for your whispering friend in the dark. Any words of comfort or affection disintegrated in the recycled air between us. 

Night after night, I continued my lessons whether you could hear them or not. My voice bounced off of the chrysalis that shielded your malleable and shifting mind. You were somewhere beyond the age of twelve. I’ve never kept track of your birthdays as well as I should. Time is a difficult concept to me now. I hope you understand. You will, eventually, I think. You’re now on this same path. But at that point in time, I could not reach you anymore. 

I wish I had more patience. This would have made the process smoother.

Instead, my anger swelled somewhere just out of my vision, almost independently of me. When it caught up to me, gnawing and worming its way back inside, I shouted and raged and threw my astral body against the barrier separating us. Your muscles would tense in fear as the shockwaves rocked you back and forth. By that point I was inconsolable, unstoppable. Mad again with desperate loneliness. This rage and lonesomeness you knew at that point. It found me at that age, too. In the long hours spent with my first guardian, it would nibble at my toes, murmuring about how I would lose him, how he secretly hated me. This must be some incarnation of this sickness. Or is it a sickness? It never felt anything other than organic to me. Maybe this is just the way we were assembled. 

Night after night I seethed and howled and launched myself against the chrysalis. You pupated beneath its thin surface where I could not reach you. It drove me mad. This small comfort I had found, snatched away from me so suddenly! So cruelly! So completely. The shockwaves grew stronger and rustled your hair. Had we been as connected as we had been before, then maybe I could have sensed your growing unease and backed off as I should have. Instead I pushed harder in a desperate attempt to reach you. 

When the force of my raving pierced a hole in your keep, the tremors punching out a fractal web that weakened your defenses, I could finally reach your sleeping mind. I was not gentle, and I’m sorry for that. In my distress I could not fully focus on the message I wanted to project. Instead it was just the frustration and the pain, and more pain, the blinding pain of both the body burning alive and the mind racing back and tearing itself apart in distress. That was the worst of your nightmares. Days later, your voice still crawled out of your mouth strangled from screaming.

So began our later discourse, the only option of communication available to me the nightmares that plagued every minute of your slumber. The comfort had leeched its way out of my detached mind, leaving only frustration and desperation in its wake. 

It did not occur to me that my son would catch on to me. In the daytime he taught you the feeble ways he had stumbled into to dissipate the psychic pressure. Luke was handicapped by his lack of a legitimate teacher. He had to grope blindly on his own. And you, you were taught by a teacher held back by his own isolation. If you only would have listened to me! Then again, I was too incoherent to instruct anyone. 

So I warred with my own son over your future. I did not know who my opponent was until much later. I could just feel his influence on you, how he taught you to draw away from me and build mental walls, walls which I easily smashed night after night. 

At that time you hated me, and that was close enough to love to satisfy my deprived soul. You began to hate your uncle as well. That loathing would often swell and far surpass anything you felt for me. You thought Luke had abandoned you. The middling techniques he taught failed you every night. He could not protect you, and part of you suspected that he didn’t want to. I can say now that he tried his very best. But still, sometimes you suspected that it was he that tormented you at night, then failed to teach you in the morning. 

You resented your mother as well. She had larger things on her mind than the mental deterioration of her only son. This sickness, it runs deep in all of us. In Leia, it drives her to conquer and bite and scratch viciously to keep what she has in her hands. The concern for you will always be secondary to that drive. I can’t fault her for absentee mothering. My children could be nothing else but heavily flawed with me as their progenitor. She lacked a strong mother figure. Padme would have been nurturing, if I had not cracked her faith so irreparably and driven her into the darkness with me. Their adoptive guardians tried their very best, I’m sure, but nothing can compare to the connection of kin in creatures like us. 

I do take pride in my children’s solution even if it isolated me in the end. Eventually the two banded together and achieved something far beyond my own capabilities. They drove me out one night with a furious concussive pressure that battered and flung me light-years away. In the time it took for me to regroup the scattered and ferocious parts of myself and return to you, you had become a man in most respects. I had changed, too. In my convalescence my burning wrath died down to ash and embers. The journey back to you returned much of my humanity. Oh, the regret! It gnawed at me with teeth sharper than the rage. I thought of thousands of ways to apologize and fix what I had broken. I thought of denying my part in your years of nightmares. I thought of coming to you as someone completely new, to wipe clean the slate and forget all of my failings. I had no chance to enact any of these plans.

On Naboo, I found a young man with the stretched-out face of my grandson. I could only watch you from afar, to my great frustration. My darling twins had erected a grand psionic fortress, a spiraling thing crafted of concentric layers. A labyrinth I could not navigate. The anger swelled but in the years wandering the vast emptiness of space we had reached a truce, and it would not overwhelm me again. I watched you from afar, unable to instruct or comfort in the way I so desperately craved. I watched you wither under the harness my children constructed for you. I watched the darkness spark and build into a barely controllable typhoon in your eyes. I watched you buck and strain against your restraints. And still I could not help you. I could only hope that one day the walls between us would crumble, and that you would see me, a lone familiar figure on the far edges of your perception, and that you would choose to come to me. I waited for that day, and finally, it has arrived. 

I can’t begin to express the gratitude I feel at this moment. 

So tell me, my precious grandson, are you ready for your becoming?

**Author's Note:**

> So yes, thanks for bearing with me. Kylux and sex and gore to follow.


End file.
